[Popcon-developers] Finally 10000 participants

[pere@hungry.com (Petter Reinholdtsen)]

[Bill Allombert]
> I would like to take this opportunuity to thanks you for all the
> effort you have spent to make popularity-contest more popular. You
> did much more communication than me.

Thank you.  While I sure have spent a few emails promoting popcon, I
do not believe the credit for the large growth would be placed on me.
After all, if the debian-installer people did not share my view that
the popcon question should be part of the default debian installation,
we would only have a fraction of the current participation.

And a thank to you too, for keeping the server part of the system
working and also for voicing the privacy issues as a counter-weight
when I want to add more and more info to popcon.  I still do, but it
is good to have to properly articulate why I believe the gain of
adding more info is more important than the disadvantages.  If only I
had time to follow up on this. :)

> Actually, most the processing scripts running time depend of the
> size of the packages files rather than of the number of submissions,
> so I don't see any problem there.

Good.  But I suspect the number of participants grow faster than the
number of packages, so we should keep it in mind.  Can we cope with
100 000 participants with the current system?  A million?  There are
quite a lot of debian users out there, and as more and more start to
use etch when it become stable, I suspect we will see an explosion in
the number of participants.

> While all the submissions happen on sunday at approximately the same
> local time, the different timezone should split the load a bit.

Yes.  Would be interesting to know if anyone are rejected from apache
if it run out of available servers.  I suspect we are not even close
to that problem, but it would be nice to know. :)

> Another issue is the large amount of storage required, we are close
> of a megabyte.

Yeah.

> I am considering adding close-up graph showing only the last 3 months.

I still recommend the use of rrdtool for graphing.  With it, we could
get daily, weekly, monthly and yearly graphs.  See
<URL:http://munin.ping.uio.no/ping.uio.no/beate.ping.uio.no.html> for
an example using munin, which is built on top of rrdtool.

Unfortunately, I believe we would loose the logorithmic scale.  Not
sure if rrdtool support it.  I can investigate if you decide to go
this way and fail to find such feature.